Lost Photos Finds Photos Buried In Your Email

Lost Photos is a Mac (and – let me get that bad taste out of my mouth – PC) app which does one thing. Well, one thing, and then a few more: it finds all the photos buried in your e-mail account and presents them to you in one easy place, ready to be tagged, saved and shared.

Our e-mail inboxes became our default file systems years ago, ever since Gmail gave us more storage space than you’d find on a then-contemporary thumb-drive. And yet, even with search, finding anything other than messages has remained painful.

Lost Photos takes care of the pictures buried deep in your email. Download the app, give it your Gmail (or Yahoo, AOL, .Mac and MobileMe) login details and it’ll start running through the years of cruft you let build up on Google’s servers. The result is a sea of photos which can be browsed, tagged, location-tagged and shared to yet more web services (Facebook and Twitter).

Worried about giving your e-mail credentials to an app? Me too, but way less than I am giving them to a web service. Which brings me to a question: are there any web services which use OAuth to connect to my Gmail and send all attachments (not just photos) to my Dropbox? If so, leave a comment or e-mail me at the address below.

Lost Photos is available in the Mac App Store now, or for direct download if you’re a Windowsian.

Follow up on my previous post, if you use Gmail, just search for “has:attachment” to find all your email that have attachments. If you want to narrow that down, something like “has:attachment JPG” will work great. Then you can use the InSync functionality to simply send those attachments to Dropbox or Google Drive.